The ballot is not a privilege the legislature dispenses at its pleasure

The New York Times reports that Republican legislators in North Carolina are advancing measures to eliminate or curtail early voting on Sundays and on college campuses — two avenues that, by well-established pattern, are used heavily by Black voters and by students. Voting-rights advocates quoted in the article are plain about the design: these are not neutral administrative reforms. They are targeted reductions in access, calibrated to fall on communities that tend to vote in a particular direction.

I will state the principle before I state the argument, because the principle is the argument: government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That phrase is not decoration. It is the load-bearing beam of the entire structure. Every restriction on the act of voting is, therefore, a restriction on the act of consenting — and a legislature that narrows consent in order to produce a preferred outcome has substituted its own will for the will of the people. That is not republicanism. That is something older and worse.

The Sunday restriction deserves particular scrutiny. The New York Times makes clear — and any honest observer can confirm by inference — that "Souls to the Polls" organizing, in which Black congregations travel together from worship to the voting place, has made Sunday early voting a meaningful institution in communities whose members face real constraints on weekday participation: longer working hours, fewer flexible employers, less access to transportation. To remove that window is not neutral; it is aimed. A legislature that claims to honor liberty while engineering the conditions of its exercise has no claim on that honor.

The campus restriction compounds the offense. A university is, or ought to be, the precise place where young citizens are formed in civic habit. I founded the University of Virginia on the conviction that an educated citizenry is the indispensable foundation of a free republic. To place a polling site on a campus is to teach, by practice, that the franchise belongs to every adult who holds it — not merely to those whose lives have settled into a form the majority finds convenient. To remove that site is to teach the opposite lesson: that voting is conditional, that access is rationed, and that rationing follows predictable lines.

I am aware that the legislators involved will frame these changes as matters of election integrity or administrative efficiency. I do not dismiss the value of orderly elections — I held that value myself. But integrity is secured by accurate counting and transparent process, not by reducing the number of citizens who participate. Efficiency that is achieved by excluding particular communities is not efficiency; it is suppression wearing a budget justification.

The deeper danger, as I saw it in my own time and as I would name it again now, is the consolidation of political power through the slow erosion of its check. A party that wins by making it harder for its opponents to vote has not won the argument; it has only postponed the reckoning. The reckoning always comes, and it comes harder for the delay. The remedy here is the same as the remedy has always been: an alert citizenry, a vigilant press — the New York Times is performing exactly the function a free press exists to perform by reporting this plainly — and courts willing to hold the line that the Constitution draws.

The franchise is not the legislature's to administer into irrelevance. It belongs to the citizen. Restore the hours. Keep the campuses open. Let the people vote.